Michael Suits

Contact Information

Academic Background

The Suits Lab is hiring motivated biochemists for MSc and PhD opportunities. Interested candidates should send an email to msuits@wlu.ca with a curriculum vitae, an unofficial copy of your transcript, and a one or two paragraph description of why you want to work in the Suits Lab.

2013 marked the 100th anniversary of Bragg's Law (2dsinθ=nλ) ; a key concept that allows crystallographers to relate diffraction patterns back to the atomic properties within a crystal. For those interesting in finding out why this centenary was significant, please refer to the following animated video produced by the Royal Institution: Celebrating Crystallography: An Animated Adventure.

Beyond the universally recognized role for carbohydrates as nutrient sources, complex carbohydrates in the form of polysaccharides, proteoglycans and glycolipids may be considered to be "the language of the cell" in that they mediate many integral biological events. Because of this central importance, research in the Suits Lab utilizes X-ray crystallography and supportive biophysical methods to characterize the interaction between proteins and carbohydrates. Our work focuses on long, linear carbohydrates such as chondroitin, heparan, hyaluronan, alginate and pectin, and addresses the how and why for microbial factors recognize and process these carbohydrates. Our work is generously supported by NSERC, CFI, The Ontario Government, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

Biography

Dr. Suits is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University. He received his PhD in Biochemistry from Queen's University where his thesis work with Prof. Zongchao Jia focused on heme processing and a lipopolysaccharide transport protein, LptA. He was a European Molecular Biology Organization Fellow at The York Structural Biology Laboratory (YSBL) at the University of York, UK with Prof. Gideon Davies where his work addressed the structure-function relationship of microbial carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes). CAZymes describe families of structurally-related protein factors that degrade, modify, or create glycosidic bonds and the frequently associated, carbohydrate-binding modules (please see CAZy and CAZypedia for more details). Dr. Suits continued this research focus on microbial CAZymes at the University of Victoria with Dr. Alisdair Boraston and included a collaboration involving the structural characterization of receptor-antibody complexes with Dr. Martin Boulanger and Zymeworks Inc. (Vancouver, BC).